4. The history of typological studies

About 5000 languages are spoken in the world today. They seem to be quite different, but some of them have some similar features or principles: for ex. In languages like English French Italian words in a sentence take the following order – subject – predicate – object, but this principle is not shared by all languages. There are languages such a Turkic languages word order is subject- object –predicate. Languages which have the same or similar features are united into different types. These common features are called universals. We may speak about semantic universals, phonological universals, syntactic universals, grammatical universals. When the same principles are shared by several languages we speak of language types. The most familiar classification of languages by their structure contains 4 groups:

They are isolating, flectional, agglutinative and incorporating or polysynthetic, but languages are never pure types. They usually elements of variety of types. But nevertheless this classification is quite reasonable and it is accepted in typology. Type of language is one of the main notions in typology. In Russian in order to make a word function it is necessary to form it with a special morpheme. Ый – in adjective – sing, masculine gender, without this morpheme a word can’t function. But flections in Russian have several grammatical meanings. If you take flexion - Ая – in – красивая – number, gender and case. Flexion – s- takes – category of number, person, tense.

If we take Tatar language and we shall join affixes to a word кыз-кызлар – the meaning of this affix is plurality.

The next type isolating one, the Chinese language is the brightest in these example of isolating languages. Words don’t change morphologically at all. In this case words don’t have morphological changes. The meaning of the sentence depends upon the word order, which is important.

Incorporating – polysynthetic languages – American Indians – in which there is no distinction between a word and a sentence. One word may embrace a lot of morphemes with separate semantic and grammatical meaning.

The history of typological system was studied by german scientist Fridrich Schleggel (1772- 1829). He considered thath there was a sharp dividing line between flexional and non-flexional languages. He distinguished two types of languages. But his brother August Schleggel divided languages into 3 groups. Languages with flexions, languages which use affixes, and languages with any grammatical structure where word order has grammatical meaning. WILGELM Humbold another german linguist is considered to be the founder of typology. The 1st group of languages in schleggel’s classification he terms isolating

1. Isolating

2. Agglutinative

3. Flexional

4. He introduced one more group incorporating or polysymphatic. He treated these groups as various stages of single linguistic development.

Another German linguist August Schleicher was the founder of naturalistic theory of language. He accepted three types of languages but also 3 types of languages have developed out of one another with isolating language as the starting point. He compares a language is an object of nature and like any object of nature (a tree) it appears, develops and dies.

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

August Schlegel (1768-1845)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)

Isolating languages

Agglutinative languages ( having morphemes without much coalescence)

Flexional languages

Polysynthetic languages (or incorporating)

August Schleicher (1821-1868)

Edward Sapir

Хао жень – хороший человек

Сиго Хао – делать добро

Дзио Хао – старая дружба

Хао дарвих – очень дорогой

Жень хао во – человек любит меня.